Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Following LBC's James O'Brien committed meat eater being succesfully converted to vegetarian ways vegetarianism is now infectiously starting to spread at LBC.

Jim Davis interviewed his cousin on LBC today to find out why she's been vegetarian for 25 years. Listeners called in to ask questions of Tony from London NutritionistsFoods for Life and Sri from Lifescape magazine.

A few people called and said they'd had to go back to eating meat for health reasons and Tony and Sri explained that all key nutrients were available from a vegetarian or even vegan diet but that you must replace the meat in your diet with suitable sources of plant based protein and that even preconverted omega 3 essential fats vegetarian DHA and EPA were now available in a vegetarian form.

A gentleman called to say his Indian father had been a vegetarian all his life avoiding nearly all animal products and lived very healthily to the age of 93.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

In the Truth About Food on BBC2 they fed elete athlete Colin Jackson a vegetarian diet and vegetarians meat and monitored the outcome. The trouble was they cheated - many foods from Vegan specialist Redwoods Foods have more protein than all the protein sources the BBC used - even the meat they fed to the vegetarians!

Shelled Hempseeds have over 30% protein , Redwoods mince has 25% Protein, some types of Quinoa are 20% protein.

Had meat lover Colin been fed some hemp and some nuts and seeds he may have become more powerfull not less.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Forget a Prius. Eat a felafel - Haaretz - Israel News: "Ever since Leonardo di Caprio, Julia Roberts and the other Hollywood superstars discovered the Prius, the hybrid car has become the symbol of the consumer battle against global warming. But few consider that a much more efficient, cheap way to prevent sea levels, floods and droughts from devastating the planet as we know it, is to turn vegetarian.

A study 'Earth Interactions - Diet, Energy and Global Warming' published last year shows that a person adopting a vegetarian lifestyle, including no components from the animal world, contributes more to halting global warming than a person who abandons his regular car for a Prius.See http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~gidon/papers/nutri/nutriEI.pdf

Shifting gears to a Prius saves more than a ton of carbon-dioxide emission a year, while adoptin vegetarianism saves at least 1.5 tons of carbon-dioxide emission a year."

Monday, February 05, 2007

Bernard Matthews claims they have "the most bio-secure" plant in Britain. Despite their claims that they have the highest biosafety standards of anyone Bernard Mathews have been beaten twice by bird flu- they had an earlier outbreak of Avian Flu in a factory farm in Hungary.

A team of 30 people were deployed to gas 159,000 turkeys - Bernard Mathews will be reimbursed the full market value of the Turkeys and this could cost taxpayers over half a million pounds

MORE than 2,000 turkeys have died after an outbreak of bird flu at a poultry farm in Suffolk, it was revealed today.

Government vets are continuing to investigate at the Bernard Matthews site at Holton, near Halesworth, where it was originally thought around 1,000 birds had died. The figure has now been reported by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) as 2,617.

Yet more evidence (if we needed it) that factory farming will continue to jump up and bite meat eaters fiercely on the bottom. The true cost of cheap meat is far too high a price to pay for the sake of human health and the health of the planet.

Justin says 'According to the UN report we humans are responsible for a total of the equivalent of 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. That’s where I got that incredible figure of 18 per cent of total emissions.

Which brings me back to my experiment in veganism. The reason I suppressed my carnal desires throughout January was to find out what difference cutting animal products from my diet would make to my so-called carbon footprint.

As usual, my carbon guru Professor Tim Jackson has been on the case. He calculates that eighteen per cent of the carbon emissions created by the average diet are from meat and a further ten per cent are from dairy products.

But, as should be apparent from this blog, only counting carbon dioxide would be a woeful underestimate. The problem is no-one has calculated the contribution methane and nitrous oxide emissions make to the climate cost of the food we eat. Professor Tim reckons it is safe to double the figure for carbon dioxide which means sixty per cent of the global warming potential of the average diet is from animal products.

Justin says 'Does that mean we should all be going vegan?

If animal products account almost two thirds of the greenhouse gasses associated with food are from animal husbandry that is surely a powerful argument for any aspiring ethical man or woman to go vegan. But does a vegan diet give you all the nutrients you need?

I felt great not eating meat and a Bupa health-check at the beginning and end of my experiment showed that I shed two kilos in thirty one days, cutting my body fat from 19 per cent of my weight to just 15 per cent.

I also saw my cholesterol level plummet from 5.6 mmol/L (rather high) to just 3.4 mmol/L (very low for a man of my age). '